12.21.09
Posted in Media, Research at 8:55 pm by Ron Morgan
One of the things that has concerned me since I discovered has been the lack of recognition of Late Discovery among adoption professionals. Today as I was googling “Late Discovery” I found this page on the Child Welfare Information Gateway web site:
http://www.childwelfare.gov/adoption/search/latediscovery.cfm
This is heartening. The links provided are few, but they are good (and since this site is linked, I feel in good company). It’s interesting to read the child welfare world’s take on Late Discovery, which seems to minimize the impacts while accurately describing them. Much work to be done with that crowd…
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12.20.09
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:18 pm by Ron Morgan
Adult adoptees are all over the map when it comes to search and reunion. Some adoptees begin the process of search as children, gathering what facts they may have at hand and actively imagining an eventual meeting with their first parents. Other adoptees never feel the need to search. Some toggle between the desire to search and feelings of ambivalence. And then there are adult adoptees who are found.
The difference between searching and being found can be profound. “Ithaka” by Sarah Saffian and “The Mistress’ Daughter” by A. M. Homes, reunion memoirs by adult adoptees who had not decided to search when they were found by their first mothers, map this terrain. While Saffian and her first mother eventually develop a positive relationship and Homes does not, their descriptions of their emotions and psychological states as they process being found are very similar. Lingering feelings of loss of control and subsequent attempts to regain control through the pace of reunion. Lack of trust and communication. Feelings of mixed loyalty. Identity shift similar to Late Discovery.
Since the inception of the Late Discovery Email list in 1999, I’ve been contacted by first mothers who searched and found their adult children and discovered that they had not been told they were adopted. All of the complicated dynamics of contact are at play in these situations, overlain by the discovery.
We have a cliché in our culture, “Don’t kill the messenger”, which, if anything, reveals a profound, if unconscious, desire to do just that, to punish the bearer of traumatic information. A first parent who informs an adult adoptee that they are adopted risks becoming forever linked with the trauma of discovery.
There are no easy answers to the dilemma of search, contact and reunion. Whether initiated by adoptees or parents, reunions are relationships without maps. The dilemma of telling LDA’s that they are adopted is complicated as well. From an ethical standpoint, adoptees should be told, but ethical frameworks seldom account for the vagaries of human emotion.
It is my opinion that first parents who find and inform their reunited adult children that they are adopted have given them the gift of truth.
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